Milly killer given whole-life term

Convicted killer Levi Bellfield has been given a whole-life jail term at the Old Bailey for the murder of teenage schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

There were emotional scenes on Thursday as Bellfield, 43, was found guilty of the murder and abduction of Milly, 13, following a one-month trial.

It has taken nine years for the Dowler family to get justice for Milly, even though the murderer lived just 50 yards from where she vanished in March 2002.

Milly went missing as she was walking home from school after leaving Walton-on-Thames station in Surrey. During the trial it emerged that police knocked on the door of Bellfield's flat in Collingwood Place, off Station Avenue, 11 times, but did not try to contact the letting agent to trace him.

Bellfield went on to kill again twice before he was arrested by London police two years later. It was then he became a suspect in Milly's murder.

He moved his family out of Collingwood Place the day after killing Milly and dumping her body 25 miles away in Yateley Heath Wood, Hampshire. Her remains were found six months later by mushroom pickers. She may have been strangled or suffocated, but it was impossible to determine. Bellfield had denied abducting and murdering Milly.

Bellfield, a former wheelclamper and bouncer, was convicted in 2008 of the murders of Marsha McDonnell, 19, in 2003, and Amelie Delagrange, 22, and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, 18, in 2004.